Add a Webhook

Go to Configuration → Services, then click the name of the service you want to add a webhook to.

Go to the service's Integrations tab.

Click Add an extension.

For the Extension Type select your webhook type or Generic Webhook.

Enter an Extension Name.

Enter your endpoint's URL.

Click Save.

To test your webhook, click New Incident on the service and trigger a test incident. Then check your endpoint for updates. RequestBin is a good tool to review the webhook PagerDuty sends when an incident triggers.

HTTP Authentication and Web Server Access

Webhooks can be sent to any publicly accessible web server, on any port, with or without encryption. They can include a username and password for HTTP basic authentication.

Specify a username and password

If your web server uses HTTP basic authentication, you can add the username and password to the URL before the host address. Special characters such as @ in the password should be percent-encoded.

Webhook Ports

If you specify http:// in your Endpoint URL, we will initiate a standard HTTP connection on port 80. Likewise, entering https:// means we will attempt to make a secure connection on port 443. To override the default port, add a colon (:) after the host address with the desired port number.

Restrict access to just PagerDuty IPs

Can I use a self-signed certificate for webhooks?

Temporary Blocks and Blacklisting

When a site goes down, it is expected that events can't be received to your webhook, or that it will become completely disabled.

When events are sent to your webhook endpoints, PagerDuty expects a 200 response within 5 seconds. If there is no response, or if there is any response other than a 200, PagerDuty will periodically retry sending the webhook.

If we receive a 500 response, it is considered a transient issue and retry logic is applied. First the event is rescheduled for delivery 50 seconds in the future. If it continues to 500, PagerDuty will back off by a multiple of 1.25^N for 7 more tries (8 retries total). This takes about 20 minutes.

After these retries are exhausted, the endpoint will be disabled for 30 minutes. PagerDuty will continue to accumulate events for the endpoint while it is disabled. Events will be scheduled for after the disable has expired. If the retries continue to fail, the endpoint will be disabled for exponentially longer periods of time (again, 1.25^N), up to 6 retries total (about 7.5 hours).

If PagerDuty still can't deliver a webhook event at that point, it will blacklist the endpoint and show that the webhook is disabled in the web app. Queued events will be discarded until a user manually unblocks it in the web UI.

Webhooks are data packets sent via an HTTP POST that allow you to receive incident state change notifications. Our Webhooks API documentation describes webhook formatting, as well as the info in each request.

PagerDuty implements webhooks at the service level under Extensions. Whenever an incident changes state (triggered, acknowledged, resolved, etc.), we'll send an HTTP POST request to your endpoint with details about that change to the URL you specify. Once you receive that request at your listener, you can then use and disseminate that information to your users — for example, through email.

You can set up webhooks on a service's Integrations tab, where you'll find a section at the bottom for webhook configuration. To use webhooks, you must enter a URL where those POST requests will be sent, and a name for your endpoint to help you identify it.

You can use RequestBin to see the information that is transmitted (i.e. the webhook as you would actually receive it) without using your own server. Under the service where you will create the incident you want to follow, enter your RequestBin address (this is the "listener"). Then trigger an incident, acknowledge, and resolve it, and check your RequestBin. Every state change will be shown there in JSON format.

Send Incident State Change Notifications via Email Using a PHP Script

For this tutorial, you will need to have access to a web server that supports PHP.

Modify the email address listed to the address that you'd like to get emails for all incident status changes within your text editor: $emailAddress = "CHANGEME@example.com";.

Upload the PHP file to your web server.

Log in to your PagerDuty account.

Go to Configuration → Services and select the service that you'd like to get notified about on incident updates.

By default, you will be directed to the Incidents tab of the service's individual page. To add a webhook, switch over to the Integrations tab.

Click New Extension.

For the Extension Type select Generic Webhook, then enter a name for your webhook, paste the URL to the PHP script that you uploaded, and click Save.

Now when an incident's state changes, you will get an email notification. You can customize the script to format the data to your liking. By default it will tell you the incident status, subject, and service, along with a link to the incident. The full JSON payload is sent with the message.